JetBlue 191 Pilot Meltdown: Why Airplanes Will Always Need Two Pilots

JetBlue flight 191 from JFK to Las Vegas, when the captain had to be removed from command and restrained, is one more reason to keep two pilots in the cockpit.

For years there has been some fanciful talk that because flying an airliner has become so automated we don’t really need two pilots to take care of it. I’ve even heard murmurings that you could safely fly by leaving it all to the computers, and dispense with humans altogether. Forget it. Not going to happen.

The reason is shown clearly by yesterday’s bizarre episode on JetBlue flight 191 from JFK to Las Vegas, when the captain had to be removed from command and restrained. It certainly proves the importance of the second officer, who along with the rest of the crew and some passengers, handled the crisis without the airplane ever being in jeopardy. (Second officers are usually flying the airplane most of the time anyway.)

Accounts from this episode portray a total emotional breakdown but not a suicidal urge to take down the flight.

The starkest case of a pilot deliberately plunging his airplane to disaster was that of EgyptAir flight 990 in October 1999. In this instance a relief first officer was flying a Boeing 767 from JFK to Cairo and was about 60 miles out over the Atlantic when he throttled back the engines and pushed the airplane into a nosedive.

The cockpit voice recorder, recovered from the ocean, revealed that the first officer muttered “Tawkalt ala Allah” (“I rely on God”) several times as he made his moves. The captain, rushing back to the flight deck, is heard yelling ,“What’s happening? What’s happening?”

But by then it was too late to recover, and all 217 on board were killed.

The record of the first officer’s voice, and the fact that National Transportation Safety Board investigators found no evidence of any mechanical failure, made it clear that—for some inexplicable reason—the first officer had decided to commit suicide and take everyone else with him.

Conspiracy theories bloomed—for example, that some high-ranking Egyptian military officers on board had been the real target, for ideological reasons. Or that the first officer had domestic problems. There was no evidence to support any of this.

However, the Egyptian authorities proved culturally averse to accepting the concept of suicide, and regardless of the Safety Board’s findings they insisted that there must have been a fault with the airplane.

The same thing happened in 1997. The NTSB found itself on the opposite side in an argument with Indonesian authorities in the case of the crash of a Boeing 737 flown by SilkAir. This airplane had suddenly dived 35,000 feet into a river, killing 97 passengers and the crew of seven.

After a three-year investigation, the Indonesian National Transportation Safety Board concluded that there was no conclusive evidence to point to a cause. The U.S. Safety Board, however, which had taken part in the same investigation, was strongly critical of the Indonesian version and was adamant that there had been no technical cause. That the cockpit voice recorder had been intentionally disconnected, and that the captain had deliberately and suddenly caused the dive. In this case, the captain had taken out large life insurance policies just before the crash.

In both the EgyptAir and SilkAir episodes, the fatal actions were taken without warning and left no time for the other pilot on the flight deck to wrestle with the controls and save the airplane. JetBlue flight 191 was never in that kind of danger.